A room without a view……

Six o’clock in the morning on board the RRS James Cook somewhere on the edge of Malin Sea in 1500m of water, and my shift as the MSCL operator starts right now. The dayshift (midday to midnight) is still fast asleep and the nightshift (midnight to midday) scientists are eagerly (or maybe more fatalistically) awaiting my arrival. The beginning of my shift marks the start for them that cores can finally be split and described soon (meaning more work for them), therefore I have been jokingly nicknamed “the harbinger of cores”.

My role during this expedition is to collect physical properties data (density, porosity etc) from the vibro and piston cores before they are split on board. I am operating a Geotek Multi-Sensor Core Logger (MSCL) in a containerised lab (also known as “the container cave”, I am in there all the time holed up with the cores). So the obvious question is – what is happening behind the closed door of the container? After the cores come aboard, they are cut into sections and labelled, and then stored for at least 6 hours inside the container to equilibrate to ambient temperature. Only after this period, the cores will be measured on the MSCL, because some of the sensors are temperature sensitive. It is not possible to prop the door open during the measurements, fluctuations in temperature would influence the data. That’s why I am holed up in the container most of the time, every so often delivering already measured cores to the scientists for splitting or taking newly labelled cores into the container.

The Multi Sensor Core Logger is a quite versatile core measurement system, equipped with four sensors – Gamma Density, P-Wave Velocity, Non-Contact Resistivity and Magnetic Susceptibility. While the core is pushed past the stationary sensors, it is scanned, and data from all four sensors is collected at once when the core pauses at a measurement point (in this case every 2 cm). Sequential core sections are loaded on to the logger, this way a complete core can be logged in a continuous process while the data is displayed graphically in real time on the computer. Typically, with measurements being done every 2 cm, a 1 m section can be logged within 15 min, but overall measurement time for one whole core depends on the amount and length of each individual section the core is cut into earlier. The shortest core section we had so far measured only 21 cm. The amount of cores sections measured each day highly varies, but a couple of days ago, 45 sections were measured on the MSCL within my 12 hour-shift, with a total length of a little bit over 41 m (a new record).

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The MSCL gives us a non-destructive way of analysing cores before they are split and sampled. The measurements can help to characterise the physical nature of the individual cores, e.g. lithology, density, porosity, and will be used in combination with core descriptions and various geochronological data to better understand the timing of ice sheet recession. The high-resolution dataset from the MSCL should also allow us to make correlations between individual core sites in the Celtic, Irish and Malin Seas fringing the North Atlantic.